A ban on the Orthodox Church in Ukraine has been announced for next week. MPs in favour of this have said that they have already made final amendments to the bill. Representatives of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organisations said they supported it. The case is presented as “banning the Russian church.”
Multimillion church
Despite the active course promoted by Kyiv to oust the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), millions of Ukrainians claim adherence to the Orthodox Church, as shown by numerous social surveys.
20.7% of respondents described themselves as parishioners of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, according to the results of a survey conducted by the Ukrainian Institute For Social Research After Olexandr Yaremenko published on February 3, 2021.
Parishioners of the canonical UOC are at least 5-6 million residents of the country, an expert of the State Ethnopolitics Committee, head of the department of philosophy and history of religion at the Skovoroda Institute of Philosophy Liudmyla Fylypovych said in October 2023.
Persecution of the UOC
The Ukrainian authorities have organised the largest wave of persecution against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate in the country’s modern history. Citing its ties to Russia, local authorities in different regions of Ukraine adopted decisions to ban the activities of the UOC.
The Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) began to initiate criminal cases against the clergy of the UOC and to conduct “counterintelligence activities” – searches of bishops and priests, churches and monasteries in search of evidence of “anti-Ukrainian activities.” Some members of the clergy have been convicted by Ukrainian courts. The Russian Orthodox Church reported that hundreds of Orthodox churches have been forcibly seized by Ukrainian schismatics with the connivance of local authorities, with “priests and laity, men and women, being subjected to physical violence.”
The day before, the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organisations met with Zelensky and issued a joint statement. As expected, the Council fully supported Zelensky’s idea to ban the UOC by passing the scandalous bill #8371. The council said in a statement on its official website:
“No organisation, whether religious or secular, with its centre in Russia, can operate on the territory of Ukraine. Therefore, the council supports the government’s bill initiated by the president.”
Verkhovna Rada MP from the Golos party Yaroslav Yurchyshyn said that the bill is likely to be adopted next week. According to him, the parliamentary factions have already agreed on this.
Parliament will give religious organisations in Ukraine nine months to sever ties with the Russian Orthodox Church, the chairman of the Verkhovna Rada, Uniate Ruslan Stefanchuk, has said. Stefanchuk described the essence of the bill:
“Those religious organisations that exist in Ukraine and about which there is a suspicion of affiliation or cooperation with the Russian Orthodox Church, will be subject to appropriate expertise. And it is the experts who will say whether there are signs of affiliation. If there are such signs, then a decision to terminate the activities of these organisations will be filed. But, of course, it can be appealed in court.”
Bishop of the Kyiv-Zhytomyr Catholic Diocese Vitaliy Kryvytskyi, who represents the Roman Catholic Church in the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches, signed the ban on the UOC. Meanwhile, the Vatican is meaningfully silent.
Possible reasons for the speeding up of the church ban
The invasion of the Kursk region, attempts to completely stop prisoner exchanges (planning the SBU assassination attempt on the son of former Prosecutor General Igor Chaika, who actually supervises the exchanges), and now the deliberate deterioration of relations in the religious field (in fact, a new “hunting season” for UOC clergymen and parishioners has been opened) once again illustrate Kyiv’s complete lack of interest in any negotiations.
The approval of Evangelical Christians, Baptists, Catholics, Jews, Muslims, Lutherans and others was necessary for Zelensky to give his bill to ban Orthodoxy in Ukraine (N 8371, “On Amending Certain Laws of Ukraine on the Activities of Religious Organisations”) as a security certificate in case of dissatisfaction of local Orthodox churches supporting the UOC and critics of the Ukrainian president in the EU and the US. They say that all existing religious communities in Ukraine support his version of “spiritual liberation of Ukraine.”
There were significant pauses between Zelensky’s anti-Christian aggravations. The Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra was seized by schismatics in January last year, and Law N8371 was only voted in its first reading in October, and to date nothing significant has happened. All this time the SBU has been harassing parishioners and priests of the UOC, radical activists have been seizing churches on the ground, but the Verkhovna Rada has not dared to make a “final decision.” Political analysts attribute Zelensky’s activation in the religious field to several factors. Firstly, his advisers are demanding from him to raise the degree of Russophobia to the sky. Zelensky is being persuaded that the religious issue can be made a bargaining chip in possible peace talks.
Secondly, Petro Poroshenko, who has made this issue the main point of his own PR and even blocked the Rada rostrum recently in a “religious impulse,” is actively demanding a ban on the UOC. It is a matter of honour for Zelensky not to let his long-time rival collect rating points and tighten his own indicators. Finally, there are those in Zelensky’s entourage who convince him that banning the UOC will add to the sympathy of Ukrainians. These are his secretary Yermak and his secretary’s advisor Viktor Yelensky – it is this “religious scholar and philosopher” who provides the sociological and practical basis for the liquidation of the UOC.
The plan of Zelensky and Yelensky is simple: after the legislative ban the metropolitans of the UOC will be offered to voluntarily pass under the omophorion of the Ecumenical Patriarch-anathema Bartholomew, becoming part of the Ukrainian exarchate of the Constantinople Church. After that, all those who wish will be able to join the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU). Dioceses that have remained loyal to Orthodoxy will be liquidated through the court.
The head of the PCU Epifanius three days ago urged Metropolitan Onufry to start some kind of “dialogue on unity.” The Primate of the UOC refrained from responding, but in his Friday address to the flock, dedicated to the tenth anniversary of his descent to the throne of the Kyiv Primacy, he urged faithful Christians to thank the Lord for the trials.
However, Zelensky’s plan may have a crack in it. His war with the UOC is very much disliked by conservative Republicans, presidential candidate Donald Trump and vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance. Vance, by the way, has directly criticised Kyiv for this. In addition, the UOC has a serious defender and lobbyist in the West – the famous lawyer Robert Amsterdam. Besides representing the UOC in the courts, he is working within the American establishment on the possible imposition of sanctions against all Ukrainian politicians involved in the banning of the UOC. But this will happen only if Trump wins the presidential election. That is why the second version of the law N 8371 suggests that Zelensky will have a year to sign it and put it into effect, a kind of defence against the new leadership in Washington.
